THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 111Eabbis of the years 50-100 had a personal know¬ledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him orconversed with him; for he is not given to writingnonsense. He does, however, imply that they knewof him as a real man who had lived and done thema power of evil. If they had only known him as asolar myth, their hostility to his followers, admittedby Drews, would be inexplicable; equally inexplicableif, as Dr. W. B. Smith contends, he had been amerely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God,incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In thatcase the Jews would rather have been inclined tofall on the neck of the Christians and welcome them ;and their cult would have been no more offensive tothem than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, fromwhich it would have been hardly distinguishable. l° 'heJustin Martyr furthermore makes statements on this gyna.point which perfectly agree with the story of the gogueshostile Eabbi adduced by Drews. Not in one, but in regularlyhalf-a-dozen, passages he testifies that in his day the e=^ecratedJews in all their synagogues, at the conclusion oftheir prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execratedhis name and personality (for name meaned personalityin that age), and poured ridicule on the soi-disantMessiah that had been crucified by the Eomans."Even to this day," Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), " youpersevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses onus because we can prove that he whom you crucifiedis Messiah." He records (ch. cviii) " that the Jewschose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forthall over the world to proclaim that a godless heresyand unlawful had been vamped up by a certainJesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were to warntheir compatriots that the disciples had stolen him